1. Field
Embodiments of the disclosure relate generally to the field of food service carts for airline in-flight food service and more particularly to a refrigerant brick and support rail interlocking configuration for multiple spaced refrigerant bricks carried intermediate food trays for distributed cooling.
2. Background
Galley carts are used on an aircraft to store food and beverages that need to be refrigerated and/or frozen during the duration of a flight. Conventional galley carts require the use of a powered heat exchanger (i.e., a chiller) to cool a housing cavity of the cart where the food products are stored. However, the heat exchanger discharges heated air to the environment surrounding the cart and consumes power that can be otherwise be used by the aircraft. Further, additional cabin cooling is needed to counteract the heated air discharged from the heat exchanger. As such, at least some known galley carts use dry ice to cool the housing cavity. However, when the dry ice is placed within the cart, it cools locally and the cooling stratifies along the height of the cart. To alleviate this problem, fans are added to the carts to circulate the cool air within the housing cavity. However, the fan requires a power source. Further, the dry ice releases CO2 gas as it sublimates. The CO2 can accumulate in the cabin and cause the CO2 concentration to increase above a predetermined threshold for CO2 in the cabin. Moreover, the cost of dry ice is increasing and airlines need to manage their dry ice supplies. The proposed invention allows airlines to stop using dry ice.
It is therefore desirable to provide a galley cart with distributed cooling which overcomes the limitations of current galley carts.